Orbital Content - Cameron Koczon

I really like this piece by Koczon, who I haven’t read before. His ideas about content liberation and orbital content are congruent with my discussions of the web of flow and liquid media. Like this:

Orbital content

Our transformed relationship with content is one in which individual users are the gravitational center and content floats in orbit around them. This “orbital content,” built up by the user, has the following two characteristics:

1. Liberated: The content was either created by you or has been distilled and associated with you so it is both pure and personal.
2. Open: You collected it so you control it. There are no middlemen apps in the way. When an application wants to offer you some cool service, it now requests access to the API of you instead of the various APIs of your entourage. This is what makes it so useful. It can be shared with countless apps and flow seamlessly between contexts.

The result is a user-controlled collection of content that is free (as in speech), distilled, open, personal, and—most importantly—useful. You do the work to assemble a collection of content from disparate sources, and apps do the work to make those collections useful. These orbital collections will push users to be more self-reliant and applications to be more innovative.

Once content is liquid, it can float through social networks, now associated with the curator, not the publisher. But publisher’s forms of monetization have to float along with the content, which is going to change the nature of advertising. And shouldn’t the curator get a cut of the revenue, too?